Beginners Guide To Revenue Management
Beginners Guide To Revenue Management
to hotel revenue
management
Contents
What is Revenue Management? 3 More Hotel Revenue Management Tactics 17
• Guest price expectations (market segments and your ideal guest profile)
To get the most revenue, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” Revenue managers are in
charge of planning and demand forecasting for the future (365 days out) and have to
be flexible enough to change their strategies if need be. This diligence helps prevent
problems such as having too many unsold rooms or selling out at a rate much lower
than it could have been.
GOPPAR (gross operating profit per available room) accounts for total hotel revenue and operating costs
to measure a property’s operating profit. By dividing total profit by the available guestrooms on property,
GOPPAR provides a simple, holistic measure of profit breakdown per room.
To start you can do things like track repeat events in your area or measure
different highs and lows in occupancy based on your specific location’s
seasonality. Ask yourself: do you get more guests in summer or winter? Are
there conventions in your area that bring in business travelers during the
week? Do you have family-friendly activities over the weekends? You can use
your local visitors’ bureau as a way to see which events are promoted.
In the end, just go for it, your predictions are probably more accurate than
you might expect. Don’t fret if you aren’t sure, your predictions and ability to
estimate demand will get better over time and you can always adjust your
decisions later. The important part is that you must start somewhere.
Believe it or not, some revenue managers update their pricing daily – even hourly. How much
time you invest should be based on the size of the opportunity. Regardless of your size, you
should revisit your pricing decisions and occupancy estimates regularly (preferably daily).
Demand constantly fluctuates, and so should your prices. You need to be flexible enough to be
able to adapt to the ever-changing market conditions and react accordingly, by updating your
prices on a regular basis.
A little bit of research and knowledge of upcoming events and your market trends will help your
estimates become even better and enable you to reach your revenue potential. It also doesn’t
hurt to keep tabs on competitor pricing – this can help you better predict demand and give
you an edge when deciding how you are adjusting your price.
There are tools available that can help you with making dynamic pricing choices.
For example, Cloudbeds’ Pricing Intelligence Engine (PIE) gathers and displays competitive
data. With competitive intelligence and an all-in-one dashboard, PIE can streamline
complicated pricing decisions.
Different distribution channels are Booking channels are represented in a hotel’s Property Management System
configured into a small number (PMS) or Channel Manager software through Rate Plans. Many of these rate
of groups, each managed plans are manageable (i.e. can be closed or opened at a specific point
simultaneously. As in the case of high in time for a specific date range). For effective Revenue Management, it is
demand, it may be beneficial for you important to have a full list of all rate plans with corresponding margins and
to close less profitable distribution discounts off of rack (also known as ‘the BAR rate’ or ‘Base rate’) and then
channels in order to maximize the to group them into 3 or 4 categories based on their profitability level (or,
resulting yield. This will slow down their “proximity” to rack rate). After that, manage these by closing the more
your property’s booking pace but will expensive (and least profitable) channels when demand and booking pace
increase the resulting room revenue is high. Then sit back and watch your ADR go up during the high demand
via the ADR growth. periods, which leads to a proportional increase in your profits.
Let me give you an example of effective channel management to channels to the most expensive and least profitable):
illustrate how this works:
When this exercise is done, simply start managing your channels by
Let’s imagine that a hotel has 6 different rate plans (this is closing groups #3 and #2 for those dates where you can sell your rooms
simplified for the sake of the example, as we know in actuality via group #1 alone, without having to offer deeper discounts. I.e., if your
this number can go up to 20-30 or even 50 in some cases). The weekends always sell out, you may try to restrict group #3 from booking
rate plans are: RACK, AAA (5% off Rack), Advanced Purchase (AP) those dates and see how this affects your occupancy and resulting ADR.
(15% off Rack promo), OTA (20% off Rack), OPAQUE (30% off Rack), For higher demand dates (special events) you can close groups #3 and
LASTMIN (35% off Rack). #2 altogether. Group #1 will always remain open.
Looking at these rate codes, one can see they’re not equal in the Make sure to check back periodically for cases when the channels need
size of the contribution to the bottom line profits. With that in mind, to be reopened if real demand turns out to be slower than anticipated.
let’s group these plans into 3 different categories, based on their
There’s one more thing to keep in mind as you open and close these
profitability level (from the least expensive and most profitable
various booking channels. In some cases, you may be unwilling to
close a particular rate code, due to contracts with different companies
that require Last Room Availability, or brand policies, etc. Place those
in category #1, which is not closeable. Everything else should be
split among your other categories, according to profit margins, and
RATE PLANS RATE PLANS RATE PLANS managed as described above.
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Rack $139 AP $119 OPAQUE $99
AAA $132 OTA $111 LASTMIN $90
Still, even as simple as this idea is, not very many hoteliers wholeheartedly
embrace this practice. In fact, it’s very common for most managers (especially
at smaller properties) to close out availability on all channels even before they
reach the 100% occupancy mark for a certain day. In most cases, this decision
is driven by the fear of having to walk a guest.
To make the right choices, when deciding to accept or reject a group By performing a displacement analysis you may discover that, in order to
business opportunity, we need to run through an exercise called improve profitability, sometimes it’s necessary to limit (or decline) a group
displacement analysis. We do this by comparing two alternatives. business opportunity for one of the following reasons:
The first alternative is the potential of generating revenue from a
group request or a corporate contract (which immediately benefits 1. Your transient booking channels don’t anticipate the deep discounts that
your hospitality business by adding revenue through room nights are normally offered to groups, resulting in a higher ADR.
sold at a specific negotiated price, plus expected additional
2. You free yourself from the risk of having a large number of rooms canceled
revenues generated from other departments). The second
(even if you set strict group cancellation rules, this risk still exists).
alternative is revenue generated from expected sales of the same
amount of rooms to transient business (potentially, at a higher Due to these reasons, every group or corporate request needs to be
price) that this group/corporate contract would be displacing. You analyzed in order to assess its revenue potential against the displacement of
can determine the breakeven price to be quoted to a group or a expected transient business.
corporate contract by finding the point where the potential revenue
from both alternatives is equal, which means that the hotel won’t be
at a loss by accepting the contract.
Large hotels traditionally use a revenue manager to handle all What should you look for in a revenue management tool?
of these strategies for them. What does a revenue manager do? Here are a few must-have features:
They gather and analyze all of the data necessary to make the
best pricing decisions to maximize profits. For smaller, independent • It integrates with your property management system to ensure seamless
properties – that’s easier said than done. Many small properties data flow between the two systems
don’t have the budget to maintain a full-time revenue manager on • It makes automatic pricing and stay restrictions changes for you
staff. With the basics covered in this guide, you can start managing
• It provides relevant and detailed data about the market and lets you set
your revenue on your own – but there’s a better and reasonably
alerts to track the competition’s pricing
affordable way to take control of your revenue management.
This is where revenue management technology comes into play.
There are various methods of upgrading: top- Cloudbeds’ Pricing Intelligence Engine (PIE)
down (mentioning the higher-priced option can help you manage room types individually
first), rate-category-alternatives (trying to upsell based on occupancy levels that are specific for
from a lower-rate category to a mid-rate one), those room types. PIE can help you tackle every
or bottom-up (mentioning the cheapest option opportunity to yield more revenue, including
first and introducing each following category helping you compare rates with competitors
in increments, such as, “For only $19 more…”) so you can make better pricing and
There are also software tools that help hoteliers distribution decisions.
maximize their revenue through proper upselling.
integration partner
As you can see, there are a number of ways hotel owners
can increase their revenue outside of more direct pricing
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